A Study on the Developmental Characteristics of Lexical Chunks in Written English of Chinese College Students

The article studied the using and developmental characteristics of four-word chunk in the paper of Chinese English undergraduate students from the aspects of function and structure. It found that the number of word chunk that English undergraduate students have surpasses that of native language learners and lacks diversity. Excessive use, little use and no use of four-word chunk are coexisting. The ability of using chunks by learners from junior grades to senior grades tends to be improved but when compared with native language learners, there is a big gap characterized by colloquial tendency.